if you could standardise a file format for a specific task what would you pick and why

jackpot@lemmy.mlbanned from sitebanned from site to Linux@lemmy.ml – 210 points –

if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?

e.g. flac for lossless audio because...

(yes you can add new categories)

summary:

  1. photos .jxl
  2. open domain image data .exr
  3. videos .av1
  4. lossless audio .flac
  5. lossy audio .opus
  6. subtitles srt/ass
  7. fonts .otf
  8. container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
  9. plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
  10. documents .odt
  11. archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
  12. configuration files toml
  13. typesetting typst
  14. interchange format .ora
  15. models .gltf / .glb
  16. daw session files .dawproject
  17. otdr measurement results .xml
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XML for machine-readable data because I live to cause chaos

Either markdown or Org for human-readable text-only documents. MS Office formats and the way they are handled have been a mess since the 2007 -x versions were introduced, and those and Open Document formats are way too bloated for when you only want to share a presentable text file.

While we're at it, standardize the fucking markdown syntax! I still have nightmares about Reddit's degenerate four-space-indent code blocks.

Man, I'd love if markdown was more widely used, it's pretty much the perfect format for everything I do

Markdown, CommonMark, .rst formats are good for printing basic rich text for technical documentation and so on, when text styling is made by an external application and you don't care about reproducible layout.

But you also want to make custom styles (font size, text alignment, colours), page layout (paper format, margin size, etc.) and make sure your document is reproducible across multiple processing applications, that the layout doesn't break, authoring tools, maybe even some version control, etc. This is when it strikes you bad.

Markdown misses checkboxes anywhere, especially in tables.

But markdown is just good. It's just writing text as normal basically

You can convert Markdown to a number of formats with pandoc, if you want to author in Markdown and just distribute in some other format.

Not going to work if you need to collaborate with other people, though.